German City Wants to Switch to Microsoft Office from Openoffice

The Document Foundation has made a big deal in the past about how a lot of cities have adopted the LibreOffice suit, but it seem that it can also work the other way.

Up until a few years ago, Microsoft was reigning supreme when it came to the implementation of its solutions with the city local authorities.

This trend started to change when the financial crisis hit and the local authorities from all over the world started to look at cheaper alternatives.

One of those alternatives was OpenOffice and a lot of cities adopted this solution. Unfortunately, not everyone was a fan and a lot of problems have arisen in the meantime, especially because the OpenOffice format is not compatible with Microsoft Office.

According to itworld.com, the city council in Freiburg, Germany, wants to ditch the open source solution and return to Microsoft Office.

"In the specific case of the use of OpenOffice, the hopes and expectations of the year 2007 are not fulfilled," the council wrote, adding that continuing the use of OpenOffice will lead to performance impairments and aggravation and frustration on the part of employees and external parties.

"Therefore, a new Microsoft Office license is essential for effective operations," a draft of the Freiburg's city council read.

Switching to LibreOffice would not solve all of the problems, even if this latter package works a lot better with the Microsoft solution.

The OpenOffice suite has been discontinued and the city council complained about documents which lose their formatting, about conversion problems between various applications, not to mention the lack of some features of the open source solution.

Free Software Foundation Europe, the Document Foundation and the Open Source Business Alliance has protested to this decision in an open letter to the city council.

The decision to return to Microsoft Office or to upgrade to LibreOffice will be taken this week.